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memories of gardenias that surrounded her, that moved with her wherever she went like a
second ghostly personality. Walter looked up; the strong gardenia perfume was in his
nostrils; he was breathing what was for him the very essence of her being, the symbol of
her power, of his own insane desires. He looked at her with a kind of terror.
'He told me,' Lucy went on, still laughing spasmodically, still dabbing at her eyes,'
he told me that he had heard that I sometimes allowed young men to kiss me at dances, in
conservatories. Conservatories!' she repeated. 'What a wonderful touch! So marvellously
in period. The 'eighties. The old Prince of Wales. Zola's novels. Conservatories! Poor
dear man! He said he hoped I wouldn't let it happen again. My mother'd be so dreadfully
distressed if she knew. Oh dear, oh dear!' She drew a deep breath. The laughter finally
died down.
Walter looked at her and breathed her perfume, breathed his own desires and the
terrible power of her attraction. And it seemed to him that he was seeing her for the first
time. Now for the first time--with the half-emptied glass in front of her, the bottle, the
dirty ash-tray; now, as she leaned back in her chair, exhausted with laughter, and wiping
the tears of laughter from her eyes.
 'Conservatories,' Spandrell was repeating. 'Conservatories. Yes, that's very good.
That's very good indeed.'
'Marvellous,' said Lucy. 'The old are really marvellous. But hardly possible, you
must admit. Except, of course, Walter's father.'
* * * *
John Bidlake climbed slowly up the stairs. He was very tired. 'These awful
parties,' he was thinking. He turned on the light in his bedroom. Over the mantelpiece one
of Degas's realistically unlovely women sat in her round tin bath trying to scrub her back.
On the opposite wall a little girl by Renoir played the piano between a landscape of his
own and one of Walter Sickert's visions of Dieppe. Above the bed hung two caricatures
of himself by Max Beerbohm and another by Rouveyre. There was a decanter of brandy
on the table, with a siphon and glass. Two letters were propped conspicuously against the
edge of the tray. He opened them. The first contained press cuttings about his latest show.
The _Daily Mail_ called him 'the veteran of British Art ' and assured its readers that' his
hand has lost nothing of its cunning.' He crumpled up the cutting and threw it angrily into
the fireplace. The next was from one of the superior weeklies. The tone was almost
contemptuous. He was judged by his own earlier performance and condemned. 'It is
difficult to believe that works so cheap and flashy--ineffectively flashy, at that--as those
collected in the present exhibition should have been produced by the painter of the Tate
Gallery 'Haymakers' and the still more magnificent 'Bathers,' now at Tantamount House.
In these empty and trivial pictures we look in vain for those qualities of harmonious
balance, of rhythmic calligraphy, of three-dimensional plasticity which...' What a
rigmarole! What tripe! He threw the whole bunch of cuttings after the first. But his
contempt for the critics could not completely neutralize the effects of their criticism.
'Veteran of British art'--it was the equivalent of 'poor old Bidlake.' And when they
complimented him on his hand having lost none of its cunning, they were patronizingly
assuring him that he still painted wonderfully well for an old dotard in his second
childhood. The only difference between the hostile and the favourable critic was that one
said brutally in so many words what the other implied in his patronizing compliment. He
almost wished that he had never painted those Bathers.
He opened the other envelope. It contained a letter from his daughter Elinor. It
was dated from Lahore:
'The bazaars are the genuine article--maggoty. What with the pullulations and the
smells, it is like burrowing through a cheese. From the artist's point of view, the
distressing thing about all this oriental business is that it's exactly like that painting of
Eastern scenes they did in France in the middle of last century. You know the stuff,
smooth and shiny, like those pictures that used to be printed on tea canisters. When you're
here, you see that the style is necessary. The brown skin makes the faces uniform and the
sweat puts a polish on the skin. One would have to paint with a surface at least as slick as
an Ingres.'
He read on with pleasure. The girl always had something amusing to say in her
letters. She saw things with the right sort of eye. But suddenly he frowned.
'Yesterday, who should come to see us but John Bidlake Junior. We had imagined
him in Waziristan; but he was down here on leave. I hadn't seen him since I was a little
girl. You can imagine my surprise when an enormous military gentleman with a grey
moustache stalked in and called me by my Christian name. He had never seen Phil, of
course. We killed such fatted calves as this hotel can offer in honour of the prodigal
brother.'
John Bidlake leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes. The enormous military
man with the grey moustache was his son. Young John was fifty. Fifty. There had been a
time when fifty seemed a Methusalem age. 'If Manet hadn't died prematurely...' He
remembered the words of his old teacher at the art school in Paris. 'But did Manet die so
young?' The old man had shaken his head. (Old? John Bidlake reflected. He had seemed
very old then. But probably he wasn't more than sixty.) 'Manet was only fifty-one,' the
teacher had answered. He had found it difficult to restrain his laughter. And now his own
son was the age of Manet when Manet died. An enormous military gentleman with a grey
moustache. And his brother was dead and buried at the other side of the world, in
California. Cancer of the intestine. Elinor had met his son at Santa Barbara--a young man
with a rich young wife, evading the Prohibition laws to the tune of a bottle of gin a day
between them.
John Bidlake thought of his first wife, the mother of the military gentleman and
the Californian who had died of cancer of the intestine. He was only twenty-two when he
married for the first time. Rose was not yet twenty. They loved one another frantically,
with a tigerish passion. They quarrelled too, quarrelled rather enjoyably at first, when the
quarrels could be made up in effusions of sensuality as violent as the furies they
assuaged. But the charm began to wear off when the children arrived, two of them within
twenty-five months. There was not enough money to keep the brats at a distance, to hire
professionals to do the tiresome and dirty work. John Bidlake's paternity was no sinecure.
His studio became a nursery. Very soon, the results of passion--the yelling and the wetted
diapers, the broken sleep, the smells--disgusted him of passion. Moreover, the object of
his passion was no longer the same. After the babies were born, Rose began to put on fat.
Her face became heavy; her body swelled and sagged. The quarrels, now, were not so
easily made up. At the same time, they were more frequent; paternity got on John
Bidlake's nerves. His art provided him with a pretext for going to Paris. He went for a
fortnight and stayed away four months. The quarrels began again on his return. Rose now
frankly disgusted him. His models offered him facile consolations; he had a more serious
love affair with a married woman who had come to him to have her portrait painted. Life
at home was a dreariness tempered by scenes. After a particularly violent scene Rose [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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